


Shades of Grey

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 03:05:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5851645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Jim comes to terms with his actions at the end of 2x11 and wonders whether he did the right thing, he wonders whether his black and white viewpoint has now turned to shades of grey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shades of Grey

“It’s over,” he had said to Lee, and maybe there was more that was over than Lee knew. Because when he looked at himself in the mirror, he no longer saw the same Jim Gordon who had walked through the doors of the Academy, then the GCPD, determined to do things properly, by the book, to bring good to Gotham.

That Jim would have marched Theo Galavan straight to Clarke, would have made damn sure Galavan was locked up. He would never have acted on Penguin’s advice to shoot. But then that Jim hadn’t witnessed the death of Officer Parks at Galavan’s hands, knowing that he could have saved her had he fired on Galavan at the time. That Jim hadn’t built up a relationship with Bruce Wayne, vowed to do what he could to track down his parents’ killer. And that Jim hadn’t seen half the things that he had seen now, the things he had seen since he joined GCPD.

Sometimes he would look at himself in the mirror, and he was no longer sure he recognised the face looking back at him. Other times he’d look at his fellow officers, and remember the negative views he had about them when he first joined the team, even Bullock to some extent before he really got to know him, and now wondering why he had ever considered himself morally superior to any of them. He had killed when he didn’t have to; he was no better.

Lee remained under the impression that there had been no other choice, that he had had to pull the trigger. Jim felt it was easier to allow her to believe that. He wanted to be a good man, the man he had always believed himself to be, for himself, for Lee and for their unborn child, and if Lee ever knew what had really happened to Galavan, that future he wanted for them all would disappear before his eyes.

Yet sometimes Jim looked back on his actions and believed that he had had no other choice, that just marching Galavan into lockup would never have been enough. It would never have felt like enough when he had to look into the eyes of Bruce Wayne, telling him all over again that he still had no more leads on the killer of his parents, knowing he had failed in keeping Bruce safe from Galavan. And when Officer Parks’s family had come into GCPD to collect her personal effects and Jim had been the one who had had to come out and see them, tell them what an asset she had been to the department, knowing that her death could have been avoided if he had just taken Galavan out when he had the chance back then. Penguin had been right. Jim was still cleaning up the city by ridding it of the stain that was Theo Galavan. He just believed now that there was more than one way in which to do so. From the black and white point of view he had always held in the past, he was now beginning to see that sometimes there were shades of grey.


End file.
